Wednesday 11 July 2012

Care fees paid AFTER you die

Trying to control life seems natural to a selfishnessness that sees everything in terms of its own interests. But it always paints itself into a corner, struggles, wears itself out and dies.

The breakdown of economic capacity to support the extraordinarily complex and conflicted entanglement is the revealing of lost or false foundation.

Be willing to question the foundations of the beliefs and ideas that are expressing a failed culture as a living alternative to persisting in an old conflicted and conflicting mentality.

Old ideas had their time, but become idolized out of context. To live within a context of unquestioned beliefs which run like a template may appeal to manipulators - but there's no fresh and lovely Life in it.

To be baited or seduced into grievance and reaction is to be sold a sense of self righteousness in exchange for your Real presence.

Your Real presence can feel the same in others. Care for all that is truly Home.

Britain's sick past: From consumption to Gulf War Syndrome, how sickness becomes fashionable

Looking at the world has led to an ever more complex and uncontrollable experience - (in which more and more energy and attention is given to the attempt to control or manage it! So I invite you to turn the instrument around and look at the mind.

Extrapolate the issue to its source; why are some aspects of this situation given priority over others?
Whilst all kinds of 'reasons' might be summoned up, it illustrates the nature of the mentality of divide and rule - for the mind of judgement usurps a wholeness of discernment, separates out from all that it judges and then seeks to prevail over its experience. It uses association with forms of truth to support its 'right and capacity' to persist as the judge but only selectively and to the degree that it can remain in control. It uses imaginative deception and distraction to keep attention engaged in protecting against a sense of danger that it actively protects within the defences it provides. It claims to speak for you. But does it?

Tuesday 10 July 2012

Doctors should report child abuse suspicions 'on a hunch' ???

In a climate of fear the 'machinery' that is likely to be set into motion by reporting suspicion tends to be blind, disproportionate and inquisitional - with guilt presumed regardless of anything anyone says or can show.

In the name of 'protection', a blind self righteous mentality is allowed to violate a family's trust in hysterical over reaction fuelled by a fear of being themselves vilified if they fail to be seen to act.

What ends up being protected - even worshipped - is the very mentality of guilt and fear that expresses itself as lovelessness and violence in all kinds of symptoms at a societal level, at family level and within the mind of a personal level.

What is always called for is discernment and a capacity for listening and communicating, that can both assess and monitor anything that might be an alarm. This discernment must start within oneself to BE discernment. There is no way a programmed template response can relate, communicate or serve to correct or remedy a need - especially when the prevalent 'culture' is one of shame, blame and vilification to be in any way associated with NOT being seen to fulfil the template requirements and therefore FAIL to protect.

Far from making sure that action occurs, a blame culture ensures that action is disproportionate, over triggerred such as to feed an alarmist paranoia, and a direct attack on those qualities of trust and communication that ARE present.

The horror, and a resulting hatred, of violence that human beings enact upon each other of a loveless intent and taking many guises is very hard to bear. The initial impulse is often to react in like kind to the energetic itself. To hate the hatred, and fear the fear, and to excommunicate and stamp out the guilt. For exposure to such, becomes experience of OUR psychic, emotional and mental violation, and few of us are awake enough to the mind's mechanisms of denial, displacement and projection - that personalize guilt as a scapegoat on the other, dehumanizing them, and find justification in righteous superiority and comparative 'innocence'.

Love in action needs to discern when not acting is honouring the truth of the situation; When action expresses a maximal and whole appreciation of shared interest - which establishes and communicates an integrity and sanctity of being, that can express forcefully but not coercively; That is trusted and held in communication enough to be able to itself extend trust and communicate.

The mentality that promotes fear and justifies hate is a deception, a manipulative intent. To fear it is to give it power, but to speak truth to power is to reveal the deception as it is.

If we are really so concerned with innocent victims, then why is the concern so highly focussed on very specificly selected instances and disregarding of so many others? Feel the bullying intent that would force the mind to comply, but don't become a victim by reaction. But see it as an alarm by which to become fully present and live from that, instead of from a set of thinking that plays out without love ever being truly expressed and shared.

The mind of deception 'divides and rules'. That is, it fragments a wholeness into parts, selects some parts and rejects others. This is a 'violence' against truth and life - for it judges as one part over another and denies the whole in which the parts are recognizably one.
A discernment is of the heart and mind as one and is an expression of willingness for true relationship and in service to all. You wont learn this from the media, but in a world tipping into insanity, it is the learning that is called for.

The 'mindset' of blame and shame is sickness that undermines any culture of trust, and communication. Love is not action so much as the field of trust and communication in which actions naturally harmonize. In which fear and guilt naturally rise to be corrected, undone, healed - rather than used to justify and perpetuate private self interests.

May the fear of love and the shame of an unworthiness of love be undone of their power to deny you.
May a desire to heal begin with a willing acceptance of healing - which is where the mind listens in the heart's guidance.
When you are truly listened to and received and honoured, you absolutely know it in your whole being. We can be that for ourselves  - and for each other.

Thank you for your attention.

Monday 9 July 2012

What Scientology tells us about religion?

Beliefs and identities. Who is free of them?
Human thinking, deceptions, self illusions, who is free of it?
Arriving at truth results not in a definition so much as an honesty of communication.
The mind at war within itself is compulsive in its thinking and believes its experience is real.
The mind of a private self-interest seeks to gain a manipulative power over others (outsiders) via shaping their thinking, and application of positive and negative incentives. It can use whatever is in your mind to shape you and its finesse is when it can do so and leave you feeling free. It can use even the highest truths in such a way as to validate Itself - over and against the others or outsiders.

Now am I describing the devil?, Religious organisations? Corporations? Politicians? Local communities? Families? Your own mind?

Fear manipulates. It may be 'unconscious' by virtue of its self justification system - whether that calls on religious or any other set of beliefs, shared definitions and accepted values.
It can manipulate by living a mask and masks can interact and enter contracts of relationship to make a cult of two - and keep the outsider our and the presentation intact. But in the process, masks disintegrate.

The disintegration of identity is not something one can get a handle on and manipulate (for that is merely rebranding or shifting 'toxic elements' into a new wrapping. We might label it as a breakdown, it may have mental, emotional and physical symptoms. But it is an experiential learning - not of mere ideas or techniques - but of an integrative process of wholeness. If anyone who is no longer able to keep up with maintaining their mask  to the world - or even to themself, then they are in need of a new basis and direction of self - because the old one was a very ingenious mask by which to evade a true intimacy yet appear to connect and relate in limited - and limiting ways.
Until there is some awakening beneath and beyond the mask, defence is fully active almost all the time. Coping in a lovelessness is not our natural being, it has to be coped with by making a self - a mask. And in times when the mask is weak, we are eager to strengthen it - and so are open to suggestion as well as to inspiration.

Religion can offer a framework that reflects the pattern and the process of our mind, which is not what we think - though we use our thought to defend our will against all comers. A will to prevail. But there is also within us a desire to know and be known; a desire to feel and share love.

The belief in the mind as an independent authoritative power reflects in attitudes of control, manipulation and deception. One might smile to disarm and actually believe one was being kind rather than fearful.

So what is the basis of real relationship? Of an integrity of thought word and deed, and an honouring of the other as oneself?
What is the nature of awareness itself - that feels like a field in which all that is felt or thought, sensed or experienced arises and passes away. I am 56 and it has never changed one jot - though the dramas of the world have often covered it so as to 'live' in a virtual life that never touches the ground of simply here and now.

What is the term religion originally signified might be 'reconnect', what tends to happen is making identity of external association, in which true connection is replaced by forms (or ritual or belief or observance etc).
This is as much a reflection of human consciousness as anything to do with religion as such.

As with many things in the world, there are tares among the wheat - and to pull out the tares will damage the crop. But in a life lived consciously, there is a natural sorting out of what is undermining of our fulfilment and what is truly fulfilling.

A relationship in which trust can be grown and sharing life in ways that are love rather than attempts to 'do' love is a gift to our children. For it is not what we say that teaches, but what we demonstrate or embody.

If the world mask (mind) is disintegrating as I feel it is - then the Soil is changing and the old plants (ideas and beliefs) will wither. To discern the new means paying attention in trust and willingness - why? because fear distorts vision and wilfulness reacts instead of listening first.

Listening in its deeper sense, is passing by reaction and discerning truth in ourself in relation to whatever situation we are in. That doesn't mean we can define what we find - but it does mean we can move from a sense that resonates as truly helpful, and willing to stay listening while we relate or act.

Whatever transpires for the couple and their child, I trust they find a better - more honouring communication in their separation and that their child feels listened to and valued by them both.
In war, truth is the first casualty. A true innocence of being is not in the mask - but the spontaneity of an unselfconscious awareness.

You cant buy or sell this or attain it by will - but it can be made welcome - by any name or no name. It isn't for using in the world of the mask - but you can let it use that to grow and communicate itself in a shared welcome - such as is freely willing.

Everything is up for change and what draws me is the opportunity for a wholly integrated culture of heart and mind; something that comes from being honest with ourselves in a deeper way than we yet imagine - and the bonds of love and trust that are found in such a commitment (across seeming differences of culture and background).

A manipulative intent doesn't work - whatever the system that hosts it.

The right to be rude? Insult a criminal offence?

It is clear to see that special cases are given priority where other cases of a similar nature are ignored.
Where defamation of character is reasonable to challenge in law, hurt feelings are not.
A quickness to use a law that was supposed to protect, as a weapon, means that all other means are not first tried before a last resort.
The criminalisation and public demonization of thoughts is a tyranny that blocks the possibility of the healing of such thoughts.
As if fear and punishment and blame can stamp out fear and punishment and blame.

However, the non acceptance of habits of behaviour that were once accepted or unchallenged is a movement of integrity - and worth finding a better way of holding.

The capacity of the mind to dehumanize or blank another, devalues both the apparent victim and the apparent victimizer - though the recipient does not have to support the mentality to which they are exposed. One does not have to validate victimhood to express an integrity of being that calls for and witnesses truth.

The value of such understandings to humanity in its currently bankrupted and insanely dislocated state are INCALCULABLE - because they unlock the mind from its own self limiting errors and open pathways through which life flows abundantly.

But the passion and identification that human minds hold as their attempt to prevail or their attempt to protect from being prevailed over - make it almost impossible for such perspective to find welcome.

The true response to error is to correct it - but this is misunderstood if we think we can see a sin in another and escape it by stoning the other. Correction is witnessed by a realignment of harmony and not of an enforcement of will upon another.

Because we have each grown a vocabulary and perception of conflicted self, conflicted interests and a loveless or mean spirited and self righteous attempt to present ourselves justified - we have a war of communication. That is we use communication and 'truths' for a war that seems unquestionably real to us and a war which a fearful sense of self WANTS to be real - as it maintains the conditions in which we are hidden. It enables us to keep our mask without the knowledge that it is a mask.

A harmony of life is not a great mystery - though the depths of potential for such an alignment of heart and mind and communication surpass anything we could imagine possible.

One does not say to one who feels victim - "don't be a victim" but support that one in awakening and expressing their integrity - an integrity of being and not a mask of righteousness.

But when 'shit' comes to us, we do have an opportunity to pause from what may seem a righteous reaction, and listen deeper for the part we play in setting ourselves up for the experience. I am not saying that we consciously are responsible for our experience of what happens in our lives - but that we are unconscious to much of our wish, thought and intent - and that this is still active even though it is 'outlawed' or denied awareness. It simply manifests as our experience by different routes if one of them is blocked.

The current trend has been to manage and manipulate society - and this reflect perfectly the mind we accept as our self. If we want to see a more honest way of relating together we must honour what we are honestly feeling.

The mind of reaction is a programmed mind. It can be manipulated and coerced but to do so is to lose ones own communication to a manipulative mindset. To pause from reaction and release the emotional charge as a valid authority from which to act, is to allow a true authority to register in awareness.

We define freedom in our own self image. But freedom is itself free to disregard definitions and express itself in its true nature. While we feel our self concept must prevail, we suffer every kind of heartbreak and indignity and struggle amidst an overwhelming complexity of adversity - or numb our minds with whatever distracts so as to protect against the dispiriting weight of it.

The key to the release of self image and the awakening of a love and freedom believed lost, dead or impossible, is perhaps most simply offered in the phrase "Love thine enemy".
But realize that they are a role in your own script, that you are giving out - and that the welcome to yourself of what you had thought to deny and reject is your own Homecoming.

It will also reflect in the behaviours that proceed - but that is not the focus.

Thankyou for your attention.

If wilful destruction and vicious criminality is a spiritual experience, then

Any releasing of constraint can bring a sense of exhilaration. It might seem a spiritual experience because a temporary removal of limit allows a sense of freedom that feels personally magnified in a wilful act of force and justified by wish to be it.

Any 'High' can be given priority over a truly relational sense; going for a short term hit without regard for the wholeness of the situation.

The 'high' is fundamental to a 'lifestyle' culture that has no sense of true authority excepting the truths we choose to use for personal hit or benefit. A manipulative collusion of markets and media and government teaches that 'force and deception is the way to get things', because our minds are being constantly programmed or medicated with suggestive intent and distractive manipulation.

An awakening remorse may open in the midst of any loveless act - and so those ones shift in their mind, and behaviour follows. That is a spiritual experience - because it expresses a truly shared purpose.

Sunday 8 July 2012

Apple, closed systems, power, responsibility, integrity and trust

(Reflections on a server glitch affecting the Apple's app system.


The benefits of a centrally controlled system are many, but the risks are great, and the responsibility of the caretakers of that system is greater still. True power must embody responsibility to be legitimately used. It (apple's offering) isn't just a product - when it is inherently dependent to the system that comes with it. This glitch is a temporary thing quickly remedied - but it brings up wider issues - for me at least!

With the resources that Apple has, it can anticipate and correct many socio-political and technical issues that can and will undermine its integrity as a service.

Corporate power has to awaken from ego-land and actively serve the environment that sustains and feeds it - rather than exploit and manipulate everything to maximal self advantage (but toxic to the Whole).

I don't mean some idealistic presentation so much as grounded practical culture of starting out from the optimum perspective available.

The apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is symbolic of a separate self interest acted out in mutuality. (Private self interest hidden behind figmented presentations of self justification).

The apple of the tree of Life is not truly lost - excepting to a continued wish to have one's own thinking prevail over truth shared. Its a matter of where one lives out From.

Integrity and trust are fundamental to all else. When the illusion of self-power is revealed as such, the awakening is to true service.

If closed systems are revealed as just another attempt to prevail over life - then they have to be abandoned.

Life demands a process of trust and communication amidst what often feels chaotic and threatening. To extend trust and communicate with integrity - one has to have uncovered it in oneself. This is the fruit of the Tree of Life - and not a matter of PR presentation.

Do we believe our own hype when we are at the top of our game? We tend to. But the pace of change now is a steep upward slope on the graph - and while it is still possible to call for awakened responsibility, I feel to do so.

Richard Dawkins clashes with neighbour over pigeons

Has Richard Dawkins met himself in his neighbour?

Are pigeons - to his neighbour - symbolic of Religion to Richard?
He doesn't want their shit in his mind?

Wherever there is the sense of 'I am' - and a corresponding definition - such as I am this and not that, then there is an identity in reaction, that gathers and constructs a self justifying mythos, that is also the nature of the 'religious self'.

As for True Religion or Spiritual illumination; let 'I am' abide without an assertive or reactive defining and justifying overlay of mind and see what you will see.

Nothing has a right to exist (or an actual existence), independent and apart from its Total Environment - which is Infinitely more Alive and Wonderful than religion or science could imagine - though both can point to.

The capacity to love, that is to transcend the limits of one's personal identification, in an extension of trust, care and honouring, is itself the opening or awakening of a greater Identification - that comes of a deeper source than self-survival mechanism.

I love that we all have this capacity for love - whether we can ever account for it or not. There are always wishful substitutes for love that mimic form without embodying the Spirit - for it is the nature of self-will to usurp Life. That is its 'job description' and what it is employed and engaged for.

Richard Dawkins does true religion a service by challenging its 'sacred cows' and attempting to deny any access or landing place to what is not legitimate.
But like Paul of Tarsus, he has done so - its seems to me - from an identification with his own thought, that has not awoken and yielded to a direct intimacy of Life.

Why do I say that?
Because when such an intimacy is yielded to rather than used for our own self-definition, we open an experience unlike anything that thought can encapsulate, contain or describe.
This also opens a capacity to discern a deeper vocabulary in all things and all people, such that the Spirit of communication is embraced rather than communication engaged as an act of self-survival; the wish to prevail.

Survival is quite natural as a key aspect of our being - but it is not ultimately at stake to the Root Awareness that is beneath and beyond all of our experience in self-definition.

Pigeons (are doves) that I note for their swooning dives of joy. You might say, how do I know they express joy - and surely I am imposing my thoughts upon their behaviours.
Well I don't 'know' what is truly in anyone (or anything's) mind excepting that there is an arising quality of being to awareness that not only looks like something - but feels like something. When these are indivisibly one, there is a freedom from the story of 'me' and my attempts to make meanings that validate or justify self concept. It is a spontaneity - that cannot be defined or expressed except that it translates into terms of external or internal 'things' forces or attributes - that is; the concepts of my mind (which is concurrent with yours).

But even if I define or describe everything accurately in the heart - as symbol, image, mythos and story - or via the mind of observed and verifiable attributes or 'facts' - I will be 'stepping outside' of the Spontaneity of life in order to construct in my own image. This is not a sin - because Life remains utterly undivided while my own mind engages imaginatively in its play. But it is a context in which the idea of self, sin, guilt and fear can arise and be validated as experience. For its nature is of an eclipsing of a wholeness of being in order to 'think, and then think some more on the basis of the think'.

When we know we are in 'as if' we do not react as if its content were real - unless of course that is our desire - such as getting lost in a movie or story.

But for those that are identified within a script as if they were the characters it gave them - will defend the basis of the story from exposure, as if their very being depended on it, by acting out the proxy characters of its thought.

Self will is a kind of choice to experience limitation, and none can take it from them. This itself indicates the power and freedom of your mind - and all of your experience (of a self in a world) proves it.

The conjecture as to whether there is a God or not is irrelevant to 'Only God'. Perhaps 'God' is not the best term because it is so misused - but there are no terms for what is unspeakably Present and witnessed in every moment of every experience, whether directly in clarity - or indirectly as the distortions and conflicting perceptions of Mind in self concept.

In all things in the world are both tares and wheat, or the baby and the bathwater. Discerning the true amidst the false is not a result of a polarised assertion of one part over another (or any result of the resulting and evolving chain of reaction). It is the result of a true receptivity to Life resulting from releasing or putting aside such identifications.

Jesus was a true scientist, because he was awake in and as that which can observe the processes of the human mind that acts out one as if it were many, and guide it to the acceptance of its true nature in a way that itself expresses the qualities of love to the recognition of love in the 'other'.

The belief that one can observe the outer as if it is actually and truly divorced from the inner - is understandable in the light of the horrors of the mentality it replaced. But the 'orphaned' or independent consciousness that seems to live by the 'death' of its 'Father', is not an innocent or true perspective, no matter how many proofs can be gathered to validate its seeming existence.

Innocence of judgement is available to any who calm their mind and release the self assertive will. Wisdom is remembering the value of this practice amidst the temptation to react. The dawning in our mind of a Unified and Unifying awareness is the basis of this step we take now. There is no way to sleepwalk through life as if we are an independent knower and doer - and know joy of Life shared. But in knowing the sharing perfectly, is a different order of certainty - in which fear and isolation are dissolved.

Let this not be a basis to imposture our 'self' in presenting some specialness over another, but grow a culture of listening and challenging our own thinking - and the experience that our beliefs create. This is not humanly easy - for we are programmed to defend and act out FROM beliefs as if our experience was in fact true. Any seeming stuckness of heart or mind has to be seen as the opportunity for a deeper curiosity as to what is actually going on here.

An unquestioned life is not living its worth. But the questions of the true desire uncover truth now - wheras the questions of the mind's disconnected thinking set up endless processes of further distraction from recognizing and appreciating the Presence of Life, moving all things (as) one.

Archbishop of Canterbury: Government has no right to introduce gay marriage

This is simple; what 'God has joined as one' is beyond the power of man to divide. If two or more uncover or are found in such a trust, such an honouring, such a recognition (as intimated in Jesus' two most important commandments), then with or without the sanction or blessing of human institution, that is the Life that moves in them.
They don't have the right to force truth upon that which is as yet unwilling to receive.

That an egocentric and assertive wilfulness attempts to make the Life in its image, is as true in the seeming lawless (non orthodox) as the seemingly lawful (official reality).

The law that holds unity must be held in people's true hearts but the laws that seek to control are an imposition upon the heart. They are the substitution for the heart's communication and wholeness by a mentality of possession and control.

To focus on the seeming conflict is the serve a deceptive mentality that plays both sides of every conflict. To focus on the true qualities of a unified wholeness - in a wholeheartedness - is to witness to that which is beneath and beyond even our best thinking, as our true Source and Nature.

That which seeks to lord it over Life - be that self or other or world, meets its own nothingness when its seeming power is suddenly gone. That which seeks to serve and hold life in honour is its own reward - and finds Itself in love shared.

Our attempts to make rules for love is an expression of lovelessness, of distrust, of a withholding of communication, and of a wish to cover a sense of personal invalidity with a seeming righteousness.

The laws that arise among us for the ordering of society and conducting of our affairs need to be renewed in our hearts - and to serve the truth of our hearts. In a world that crucifies or denies the heart's light, is also the breaking through of an awareness that is in the world but not of it.

The Christ -  message is eternal, but its expression in time is using what is in our mind (and our world) to teach the mind its true source and nature.

To make our identification (invest our heart) in self  and mutual definitions, held over and against differences by reaction, is to sleep in the mind that does not know the Life in and by which it lives and moves and has its being.

The quality of real relationship is the saving of the mind from its own illusion. The bridegroom comes when ye thinketh not - and not as your past learnings lead you to expect. The thinking of the world must yield to the Life in which it ignorantly but utterly depends. This is not a matter of time - but of willingness.

The undoing of guilt is the nature of the Light in which salvation is recognized. This cannot be undertaken by a self that is itself a strategy of the hiding of guilt. In every (moment of ) real relationship, trust is extended in place of the disposition and presumption of a separating and private self interest.

To feel denied in our love is a deep sense of disconnection from which a mind of confusion rises. A relationship is also a context in which this confusion rises to the surface awareness to be dissolved. To over control the symptoms is to deny the process of healing. There is always a need for true discernment, to remain free of 'falling asleep' in our concepts - especially if associated with a sense of self righteousness.

True marriage is before God, and in non God vocabulary could be said to be revealed and honoured in many as one. The forms things take do not make them real or unreal. But the witnessing of love is the underlying bedrock of sanity and culture. To seek validation is upside down, in a true love, we extend or share it to others.

The confusion of sex with intimacy is the confusion of form and spirit. Seek to be found in the Spirit or true purpose of life - and the forms will align (will be added). Not to fulfil a rights charter, but to further uncover the true nature of being.

We are (generally) afraid of true intimacy. This honesty would help us see clearer. Until then, confusion is used to hide in.